LONDON - JASPER JOFFE'S LIFE OF JIZZ

This is Jasper Joffe. He's very high here. High on hubris. High on being Jasper Joffe. As if the Britart "me, me, me" generation hadn't gone far enough – as if Tracey Emin sketching herself masturbating (how did she hold the pencil steady?) wasn't onanistic enough to put you off your copy of Art Now – Jasper Joffe has recently also concluded that l'art c'est moi.
The man who painted Himmler in lush pastels is spending the rest of this week flogging all his possessions at the Shoreditch gallery. Childhood photos, big fuck-off TVs, love letters, toothbrushes, racist dolls – they've all have been divided into 33 lots, priced at £3333.33 apiece. Nice work, Jasper.
He is doing this, he says, for two reasons.
Reason one: he's 33. Jesus had been there, done that, and got crucified by that point. It's a pretty high peg to measure up to, he says. (Didn't tell him about Alexander the Great conquering the known world by 24.) Reason two: his girlfriend recently split up with him. So there's a certain amount of self-flagellation going on here.

An hour before the preview, Joffe lay on his back on his bed, his bare feet pointing upwards, blackened with dust. He seemed like the kind of guy who spent most of his life shoeless – a hazy, pootering dress-down figure, never swayed by club rules.
“I'm not selling things I use, just things I own,” he essayed. Like Jesus, he's now living with his mum at the age of 33. The bed he now sleeps on is hers. The crockery he dines off is hers. This fact plugs the absence of a swathe of stuff not on display. Q: Where is Joffe's shampoo/bin/alarm clock/loofa? A: It's actually his mum's.
Jas has always been a bit stunty. He once painted 24 paintings in 24 hours to "demolish the myth of inspiration."

“Normally I sell small paintings for £3000, so it's pretty much 'buy one get five free',” he motioned, as he pointed out Wolfgang Tillmans and Tracey Emins among his collection. “The lots thing is a way of equalizing things, so you're not giving a hierarchy to one part of your life or art.” He then waved a hand towards his bed. “I like the idea of having the bed at the centre. It's like your funeral pyre – lying in state with the stuff of your lifetime gathered round you.” Then he excused himself and went around hurriedly plonking labels on pieces, even as the art world rapped on the door a half-hour after opening time.

At 7 PM, the bolt slid back and the place thronged with both art-lovers and art-likers. A couple of six-year-old girls milled about in their best dresses, hungrily eyeing Jasper's teddies, unable to fathom why they cost £3333.33p. They did not seem to see the value in purchasing them as part of an all-in lot that also included this:

No, multiple jizzing cocks dripping pearly whiteness over naked lady flesh was the furthest thing from their minds. They were more into situationism.
In common with many of his Young British Artist contemporaries, Jasper clearly loves to explore the dank undergrowth of his psyche. Particularly the dank undergrowth that contains jizzing cocks.

Jizzy-jizz-jizzity-jizz all day long. Below is the sort of pinko filth he drew in his early years.

Rifling through a stack of books, there was one that stood out as possible source material for this life-change-o-rama.

Below is perhaps Joffe's most famous piece, a pastel portrait of Heinrich Himmler that Charles Saatchi once big-upped – which, in the Britart scene is the equivalent of being picked for the first eleven (except with less cricket and more sculpting your head out of your own shit). Himmler was proof that even a chicken farmer can look vaguely distinguished if you put him in a nice enough uniform. And this is a fantastic uniform. Apparently he died in the war.

Meanwhile, Himmler's old mucker had been getting busy with an easel, and Jasper had his only known painting. Say what you like about Adolf Hitler, but not only was he Germany's greatest lover, he could also turn out a wicked bit of abstract art when he put his mind to it.

But it's not all about the far-right. Say hello to Jasper Joffe's leedle friend. This is the doll he uses to overcome racism in the outreach training seminars he runs in the rougher parts of Dagenham with his Prince's Trust-awarded "Luvawog" program. Nah, not really. No idea what the story behind it is.

The first big clue as to why his girlfriend had left him came when we deduced from the diminished contents of his wardrobe that Jasper Joffe doesn't wear underpants.

This tale of a prattish upper-class Englishman much given to wallowing egoistically in his own circumstances is a bit like Toby Young's book.

You know that a book is really worth buying when someone of Matthew Collings' stature offers a non-committal snippet of praise on the cover.

Flicking through it, it seemed to be about a solipsistic narrator who thinks he's the most fascinating man he's ever met and twaddles on and on about this fact. Think this was also Jane Austen's original idea for Sense and Sensibility.

Next to the board games, tennis rackets, journals, and MA thesis was a polaroid of the artist as a young man. Many photos. Remember when everyone used to have loads of drawers of photos, with people's heads cropped off, fingers over the lens, red-eye, all of which they'd paid actual money to have developed? No, of course you don't. You were born in 1996.

The crowds lapped it all up.

They looked hungry. They looked like buyers. By the end of this week, if all goes according to plan, Jasper Joffe will be a £110k-ionaire. He will have enough money to put down a deposit on a nice flat in Kensington. Or a nice house in Ealing. Or just a nice night with 100 top-class hookers. That's the kind of life-changing decision you can make in the modern art world if you are prepared to sell everything you own. I told him to go for the hookers. He could sell ringside seats to it as his next art project. He could turn a profit on a nice night with 100 hookers – that would make him a dude in anyone's books.
But by that point he wasn't really listening. No, Jasper Joffe had turned away, and was talking to people who were important.

They, in turn, were reflecting Jasper Joffe's manic light right back at him. Everyone was here for one purpose and one purpose only – Jasper Joffe. Like Jesus, he wanted people to love him. Like Jesus, he enjoyed bread and wine. Like Jesus, he mixed easily with prostitutes and lepers. Unlike Jesus, he had discovered an authentic painting by Adolf Hitler. Suck it up, Jesus.

Comments

eh. cool idea but what about when you buy a lot and take it home. i mean, do you set it up all together or use it like normal and get an internal kick from knowing that he used to use it? maybe i'm missing the point.